With his team at the top of the first division and anything up to 8,000 fans expected to cheer them on against Saint Patrick's Athletic tonight, it would seem, on the face of it, that things just couldn't be better for Waterford United's affable player manager.

Tommy Lynch is certainly the first to admit that he's enjoying how things are going for him in the southeast, but the 33-year-old Limerickman is also quick to point out that this season is a case of make or break for him. Promotion, he feels, will open the door to a range of managerial possibilities, but failure to achieve the club's main priority for the season will almost certainly mean that he and his employers part company over the summer.

"I think if that were to happen I'd probably just have to go to them and say `Well, maybe you have the wrong for the job'," he says. "I'd have to concede that I'd got it wrong and let them get somebody in who could get it right. But having said that, at the moment things are going well and I firmly believe that we will go up. If that happens, the problem will be to figure out a way of staying there, and that will be a whole new challenge for me."

For the moment, then, Lynch is happy to be doing what, in his heart, he always knew he would do one day. "From the time I was 19 or so and playing for Limerick City," he admits, "I always knew that one day I'd be the manager of a League of Ireland club. Just like now I believe that one day I'll manage Shrewsbury Town."

Shrewsbury, of course, is where Lynch spent the bulk of his playing career. He spent time with City and Sunderland all right, but it was during eight years at Shrewsbury that the midfielder really learned his trade. And it is what he learned there that he looks to pass on to those around him now.

Professionalism is the main lesson. Billy Hamilton started to instill it in the teenage Lynch in his early days at home, but in England he was impressed with the way things were done. Now, he feels, it's only natural that he is anxious that Waterford take on board the same attitude.

"Even in the short time I've been here there has been an improvement at the club. We learned a lot from last season and we were all better prepared for this one. So on and off the pitch things are constantly getting better at the club.

"We've all got ambitions, though. The club has to make progress, just as, having gone to Longford and Monaghan for a couple of years, with all due respect to them, now I want to go to Derry and Dundalk."

If that can be achieved then the potential rewards for the club are considerable. With regular crowds of around 1,500, the population of Waterford showed the underlying level of interest in the club during last year's cup run when games against Monaghan, Shamrock Rovers and Shelbourne all attracted near capacity to the Regional Sports Centre. Capitalising on that sort of interest by being involved at the highest level on a regular basis is now the immediate priority.

In the longer term, Lynch feels, just as he did in his playing days, that England would be the next step. "But I've got a really strong feeling that the league here is going to take off in a big way, and so it may well end up that there'd be no reason to go back over there when things are going so well over here. Either way, I still see a long future for myself at Waterford."

He also, it's clear, sees a long future for himself on the field where he remains, at the moment, the central force in Waterford's drive for a place amongst the game's elite here.

Modelling himself on his hero, Al Finnucane, Lynch has made the number four shirt his own and still reckons there's a few decent years left in his legs.

"Al carried on 'till he was about 44, and while I don't exactly see myself doing that I'm in no hurry to pack it in quite yet.

"It's not as if I'm a box-to-box player. At the moment I just stand in the middle and point at where I want something done. They're good fellas around me, so I get to take it easy," he says with a hint of a chuckle in his voice.

In terms of his playing career, promotion would also present a new and enjoyable challenge. Tonight Lynch is hoping to see just how well he and the "good fellas" around him cope with one of the toughest challenges the premier division has to offer.

"We'll be looking to win, I'm of the opinion that every game is there to be won, but whatever happens we'll get an idea of how much more progress we have to make if we are to get by next year.

"We already know that we'd have to add on another few players, because we've seen how difficult the teams that have gone up last year have found it. And, after we figure out how to stay up, we have to figure out ways to start challenging for silverware."

The time to be thinking in such terms, he maintains, is not so far away for Waterford, but it can only be reached by overcoming a great many little challenges along the way. Tonight is just one of those stepping stones.